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Plataea Performed: The Impact of Audience on Herodotus’s Histories
- Classical Journal
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 117, Number 1, October-November 2021
- pp. 1-31
- 10.1353/tcj.2021.0004
- Article
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Abstract:
The Plataea narrative’s consistently negative portrayal of Sparta and correspondingly positive portrayal of Athens may reflect the narrative’s origins as a performance piece, originally recited for the Athenians and then adapted into written form for the ‘publication’ of the Histories. This hypothesis, which can be understood in terms of both recent and long-standing scholarship on epideictic orality and the Histories’ composition, helps to explain many of the most distinctive features of the narrative, especially its unwaveringly propagandistic approach toward Athens and its relation to Herodotus’s well-attested career as a performer.